The present invention relates to a vend rack for a vending machine that stores soft drink bottles or cans and feeds the same to a discharge port in the front of a vending machine in a uniform manner. More specifically, the present invention relates to a vend rack mechanism having the flexibility of storing selected numbers of vendable bottles or cans in separately accessible vend columns.
One of the most widely used conventional vend racks for bottles and cans in a vending machine includes a plurality of side-by-side, vertical storage columns, each of which communicates with a discharge port in the front of a vending machine. These columns are disposed in parallel relationship, and the quantity of vendable products therein is usually controlled by dimensioning the width of the columns to receive either a double row of nestable bottles or cans or a single stacked row of bottles or cans. These columns may either be one-deep, two-deep or three-deep, depending on the depth of the vending machine cabinet. This conventional vend rack suffers from the disadvantage that there is little flexibility in choice of the number of vendable products that can be stored in the respective columns. Therefore, it is difficult to match product demand with storage capacity for any given column for a vending machine of this type which conventionally contains from five to nine selectable products from seven to ten columns.
The demand for different types of products may depend on sales location or general popularity. In addition, in vending machines such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,380,130 to Bachmann, et al., issued Apr. 19, 1983 and assigned to the same assignee as the present invention, product sales or demand is also influenced by the unique styling of the vending machine including the use of an enlarged primary product selection button adjacent the coin slot of the vending machine. Accordingly, the need for more flexibility in product storage and delivery from the respective chutes of a vend rack are even more acute in a vending machine such as described in the Bachmann, et al. Patent.
One attempt to provide greater column selectivity in a vender is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,245,755 to Craven et al. In Craven, some increased selectivity is achieved by a communicating slant shelf extension of a column for which the storage capacity is to be increased. However, even the Craven apparatus has limited selectivity.